Time Cannot Erase
by Anime Girl23
Summary: There are five stages to grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Two years after the murder of one of their own, the members of what used to be Glee Club are still trapped in the fourth stage. - Ensemble with some Puck/Kurt slash


Hi! Okay, so this is the first Glee fic I've actually posted, though it's not the first I've written. I may get around to posting the other ones in the future, but I haven't decided. Hope you like and please review!

**WARNINGS:** Contains death (graphic), homophobia, and self-harm. You may want to have tissues and something to snuggle within reach.

Disclaimer: I don't own Glee, nor am I making any profit from this fic.

Time Cannot Erase  
One-Shot

No one was quite the same after _it_ happened.

The hallway by the choir room was oddly quiet now, a moment of silence that didn't seem to end. No one wanted to speak, not about the slightest thing in that hallway, too busy casting scared glances at _that_ spot.

Sue Sylvester had paid to have the floor there replaced and to have the wall repainted so many times that the smell of paint still lingered in the air. No one ever talked about how the money had come from her own pocket.

Glee Club was over. None of them even went in that hallway anymore, constructing schedules and routes around school that were guaranteed to keep them clear of it.

Rachel still sang sometimes, quiet little songs under her breath that were always about loss, but she never made it past the first verse before she broke off into sobs that had her running for somewhere, anywhere to hide. She didn't put stars at the end of her name anymore.

Finn threw himself into football, trying to busy his mind with something that wasn't the soul-crushing pain that kept him awake at night. It worked until he got distracted one game and took a tackle wrong. Now, he was just trapped in a wheelchair, numbing the pain with alcohol instead of sport.

Quinn kept Beth, knowing every day that she did it for the wrong reasons. She wanted to love that little child with too-light hair and skin, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. She let her mom hire a nanny and let the nanny do it all. Beth didn't cry for her mother anymore. Quinn never stopped crying.

Artie packed his guitar away. He played it one final time, a soft song at the funeral as the others tried to sing a final song together. They never finished it. He tried to when he got home, but the song was wrong. It needed two people and he was only one. He cut the strings before he shut the case forever.

Tina had been the one to find him _that_ day. She'd left her jacket in the choir room and...she didn't sleep anymore, not without pills. They were the only thing that kept her from dreaming, but even that black oblivion wasn't enough to help her forget those dead, staring eyes. The stutter came back, but this time it was real. It showed at the funeral when she couldn't even manage the first line.

Mike started smoking. He stole his mom's at first, a little one just to calm his nerves here or there, but it didn't take long before he was using a fake ID to buy his own packs. He inhaled the poison, blackening his lungs until he'd damaged them enough that he couldn't even dance without getting so winded that spots moved across his vision. He mourned the loss with another cigarette.

Mercedes lost her color. Those bright colors that came into her wardrobe when she joined Glee were burned the day of the funeral. She wore black now, sometimes gray if she was feeling a bit more cheerful. The diva in her died the day he did, because she wasn't the one that mattered anymore, not when he was gone and there was one less member of her graduating class.

Matt didn't speak anymore. He'd been the one to answer Tina's screams. He was the one that tried to perform CPR on a body that was already cold. He didn't sing at the funeral. He tried, but nothing came and the quiet boy became the mute boy, clutching a notebook to his chest just in case anyone tried to talk to him. No one did.

Santana broke. She'd been the only one of them to try going back down that hallway. She hadn't even made it half way before her eyes locked on _that_ spot. Mr. Shue found her against a wall, crying and rocking, her eyes locked on the place that he'd died. Medication kept her calm now, lost in a haze as she stared out a window in her hospital-issue pajamas.

Brittany understood enough to know that he was gone. She didn't understand why, but she knew that he wasn't coming back. When Santana was taken away, she'd wandered the halls without purpose, always avoiding _that_ hallway. She knew enough to know that that was where he went away. She didn't like that hallway.

Kurt tried to move on, he did. There was Sam, a perfectly likable boy that he could have loved, but his heart wasn't in it. Sam wasn't the one he wanted, the one that he screamed for at night when the nightmares woke him up. The designer clothes he used to adore were gone, replaced with whatever he grabbed off his floor. The only thing he cared for anymore was the letterman jacket that was left for him. He wore it every day, letting it dwarf him as he walked around on autopilot. It killed him to wear it, because it didn't smell right anymore. It smelled like his soap now, but he knew it should have smelled like Chinese food and that little hint of chlorine.

It didn't smell like Noah.

_That_ day destroyed every last one of them, the day that Karofsky finally got sick of watching Noah and him kiss in the hallway. It hadn't been Noah's fault. Logically, Kurt knew that, but a part of him hated Noah for cutting Math that day. If he hadn't been skipping in the choir room, he wouldn't have been in the hallway, and maybe, just maybe Karofsky wouldn't have been able to go at him with that knife.

Kurt still didn't know the exact details of what happened to Noah. He used to hear Tina muttering to herself about the blood, about wounds so deep that she'd been able to see his spine, his ribs. His imagination was always enough to send him running for the toilet. Even if he were given the chance to see the crime scene photos, he didn't think he'd ever want to. It was bad enough that he'd seen the image Jacob had had the gall to post on his website, the picture of the wall where Karofsky had written _FAG_ with Noah's blood.

He didn't want to remember any of that. He wanted to remember Noah as he had been; smiling as he strummed his guitar, that mischievous twinkle in his eyes when he'd kiss him, the pure peace he'd be at when they lay wrapped in each other's arms, naked and sated.

His dad said that someday he'd be able to remember Noah without bursting into tears, like he was able to remember his mother now. That day still hadn't come, not even two years later, because it wasn't right. It wasn't right that he turned eighteen and that Noah, the first boy that had ever loved him back, was still sixteen and lying cold and dead in the ground.

The cuts littering his body were his only source of comfort in the pain. His arms, stomach, and legs were covered in scars and new marks. He knew Noah would hate this, would hate to see the pain his death had caused, but not even that was enough to make him take that blade away from his skin.

Kurt knew that one day, he could cut too deep and that it would all be over.

Everyday, he wished more and more that he could find it in himself to just do it.

The End

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